(Roughly) Daily

How do we make sense of the world? How do we make our ways through it? Venkatesh Rao cautions against both of the currently-dominant narratives that shape our perceptions and actions: the “helpless witness,” as evinced in the quote above, and the other dominant lens, the “blind builder”…

It is hard to make sense of events these days because we feel constantly forced into a false choice between blind builder narratives and helpless witness narratives. Stories told by people so enthralled by new agencies they don’t notice their insensibility to current realities, or the poverty of their future visions driving their excited building. Or stories told by people so lacking in agency of any sort that their visions, while richer, are uniformly bleak and framed by their own sense of utter helplessness and doom.

The fundamental inadequacies of these frames, much more than the right/left political leanings usually associated with them, is perhaps the real reason for my refusal to ally with any of the narratives on offer. I don’t want to be either blind or helpless, or move along a tradeoff curve between them.

An interesting pattern that’s popped for me as a way out of this bind, and a possible stance from which to narrate and inhabit more powerful sorts of stories, is working with media that are simultaneously about seeing and doing...

Eminently worth reading in full: “Not Just a Camera, Not Just an Engine,” from @vgr.bsky.social‬.

* Christopher Isherwood, “Goodbye to Berlin” (in The Berlin Stories)

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As we reframe, we might recall that, on this date in 1872, Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for voting.

In 1863, she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had founded the Women’s Loyal National League. In 1866, the pair initiated the American Equal Rights Association which campaigned for equal rights for both African Americans and all women. In 1869, they created the National Woman Suffrage Association and on this day in 1872, Anthony attempted to vote in her hometown of Rochester, New York– and was fined $100 for doing so. She refused to pay the fine and the authorities declined to take further action against her. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton presented Congress with an amendment giving women the right to vote. It became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. In 1979, the United States honored Anthony by placing her image on the one-dollar U.S. coin.

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